The Challenger Sale

Expect Casualties
Some of your reps—in our experience, between 20 and 30 percent—
probably won’t make the transition to the Challenger model. Maybe they’re
just too stuck in their ways, or maybe when they see the Challenger profile,
their reaction is, “Whoa, that’s not what I signed up for.”
This doesn’t mean they’re bad employees. But it also doesn’t mean
you’d want them in a quota-carrying role, especially on your more complex
accounts. Many of our members have found these individuals to be
extremely well suited, for example, to a customer service role, or perhaps
even more intriguing, for a marketing or product specialist role—places
where they know the frontline business well, but aren’t on the hook to face
off with customers in a challenging manner in the same way a sales rep will
need to.
Either way, keep in mind that if 20 to 30 percent of your sales force
can’t
make the transition, that means that 70 to 80 percent 
can
. And that’s
really good news for sales leaders. Remember, this isn’t about rewiring
people’s DNA or changing who they are as a person. It’s about equipping
them with the skills, tools, and coaching they need to 
act
like a Challenger

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when they’re in front of the customer—and that’s something many reps not
only are able to do, but also are excited to try. It offers them a whole new
and much more concrete path to professional success than they’ve ever had
in the past. We’re not asking reps to change 
who
they
are
, just how they
sell.
Consider Piloting Before Broadly Launching
W. W. Grainger, Inc., profiled in 
chapter 5
, took a very careful, pilot-based
approach to rolling out their new sales model and teaching collateral. Most
companies pilot new tools to understand what modifications should be
made before launching them to the entire organization, but Grainger goes
one step further. They pilot tools to understand when and why adoption will
plateau. They’re after four questions, specifically:
1. How big is the early adopter group for this tool (i.e., when is the
adoption curve likely to plateau)?
2. Who are the early adopters, and how are they different from
nonadopters?
3. What metrics can we track to more accurately predict the impact
of this tool?
4. What can we learn from this experience to improve tool impact
and push greater adoption among the majority who don’t adopt?
By answering these questions, Grainger’s sales operations team can
build a plan for how to break through adoption plateaus when they occur.
Grainger finds that reps naturally cluster into one of the following time-
based segments when deciding whether to adopt a tool: early adopters,
majority, laggards, and naysayers. Pushing too early for adoption to a given
segment before successfully winning over the previous segment can be a
waste of organizational energy. For example, the majority population waits
to observe early tool success, while the laggards need to see success from a
peer closer to their segment before acceptance will occur. Targeting the
correct population at the right time with the appropriate advocates and
through the right channels is the key to driving adoption beyond the

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“chasm” that companies normally hit once the early adopters have all
adopted—very similar to rolling out a new product to the market.
One additional note about the Grainger adoption practice: Proximity
matters. Something sales managers love to do is to tell their average
performers to do what their high performers do. But modeling star-
performing sales behavior as a way of “selling” change internally can
actually lead to failure. In terms of prescribing the right actions, following
high-performer behavior is the right play—and this book goes into some
detail about our perspective on a specific set of high-performer behaviors
that you should replicate—but when it comes time to roll this change out,
this approach of “do what the high performers are doing” can actually do
more harm than good.
Why? People don’t start using tools or practicing certain behaviors
because star performers have success—they use them because people 
just
like
them
are having success. To roll this new approach out to the broader
sales force, you also need to look for and document examples of 
average
performers
in different markets or with different product portfolios who
went from non-Challenger to Challenger and had success doing it. And that
obviously can’t happen without the right type of pilot.